I Want You to Know That Your Wants Matter

What is the purpose of your life?

Why are you here?

If you had asked me these questions three years ago I would have probably answered that I was here to be a good mother and wife. To help others and contribute to the world. To make myself into a better person and overcome my faults and weaknesses.

But I certainly wouldn’t have told you that I was here for joy, for excitement, for expression.  I wouldn’t have told you that I was here just to delight in each new day and the experience of being a human with all of my good and my bad, my light and my dark.

When did we as women get sold the idea that we need to work for our joy?  That our greatest gift to the world is sacrificing our own wants and pleasure to take care of and serve others?

I can’t remember there being a moment when I took this on, it just always seemed to be the reality. And I didn’t have the awareness back then to recognize the pain and sadness in the fake smiles of the women I grew up surrounded by.  

When women try to fit themselves into too small of boxes, all kinds of things happen. 

  • There are women who become so filled with resentment at not accomplishing their own dreams that they pour all of that energy into controlling their children and living through them.
  • There are women who slowly fade into addictions to substances like food, alcohol, and medications to numb the feelings and tolerate the intolerable.
  • There are women who hustle and checklist their lives away trying to earn that love, trying to earn the right to feel good and like they are enough.

When you grow up believing that you do not have an inherent right to be who you are, feel how you feel, and act accordingly, parts of you have to be shutdown, ignored, or numbed to survive. 

And then you go through life feeling like you’re half alive and half zombie. Always trapped between making others happy or choosing happiness for yourself.

But I want to dispel that lie. The lie that somehow you will hurt the ones you love by choosing happiness for yourself first. 

The reality is that you’re not doing anyone a favor by people pleasing and lying to yourself and others to try and be what you think you’re supposed to be, because eventually, you won’t be able to sustain it.

Trust me, I know.

I hustled hard for my self worth for the first 29 years of my life and definitely throughout 10 years of my marriage, and then one day I hit a wall and realized I was so empty of joy and connection in my life that I was done.  

I had created a life that was there to fuel and take care of others lives. 

And the crazy thing was, no one else knew that I wasn’t happy.

When I did eventually move forward with divorce, my husband at the time told me that he just hadn’t understood how bad things were, and I knew that was because I had done such a good job at what I thought I was supposed to do –  pretend that I was happy.

But pretending is no longer our lot in life as women. The world is shifting and women are waking up to the beauty of trusting themselves. 

Of believing that they are worthy of a full life lived on their terms and filled with all that they desire – whether that’s a career, marriage or no marriage, bearing children or no children, partnership, adoption, travel, stillness, play, pleasure, excitement, passion, relief, and peace.

And it all begins by letting go of the belief that your wants are selfish and you’re greatest calling is to take care of others. 

I want you to know that as you honor what you love and feel called to in your life, you will become more round and full. 

You will fill up with yourself and the excess will spill over onto everyone and everything in your life.  Then your children will grow up with a mother that loves them not because she has to, but because she is so in love with herself and her life that it happens naturally.

This is the gift given to the world when women love and honor themselves first.

Why Loving Yourself First Matters

Love – noun: an intense feeling of deep affection.

Somewhere along the way while growing up, I missed the self-love memo.

Instead I picked up the idea that love was something I earned from others by making them happy.

When I was doing what my parents wanted, they loved me more. When I was pretty and funny and easy to be with, my boyfriends loved me more. And when I wasn’t those things, it felt like love was withdrawn.

So I learned how to change my behavior to try and match what I felt would illicit more love from whomever was in front of me. And I learned how to wear different masks to get love from different people.

But then Brooke Castillo blew my mind with the idea that love is a feeling. And feelings are created with our thoughts. Thus, no one else can “give” you love or make you feel loved, because it all starts in your brain.

So I went and peeked in my brain to see what thoughts were there creating love and I found quite the opposite.

Thoughts like:

  • He doesn’t care about you.
  • If he really knew you he wouldn’t love you.
  • You’re so naïve and needy.
  • You don’t have anything valuable to offer.
  • You’re failing.
  • You need to be better than you are.
  • Why can’t you handle all of this like everyone else?
  • I’m broken.
  • Something is wrong with me.

Any of these sound familiar?

For some of us, it really is true that we say things to ourselves in our minds that we would never utter aloud to another human being.

But it’s like our brain thinks, “If I just beat you up enough, you’ll feel motivated to change and be better.“

It doesn’t work that way my friends.

The more negative and self-deprecating our internal dialogue, the more negative emotions we create for ourselves and then end up acting from.

And when the foundation of your thoughts about yourself is, “I’m broken and there’s something wrong with me,” you’re going to feel that in every aspect of your life, from your career to your parenting to your marriage.

We think the solution is to get up and DO more. Go out and be kinder, say nicer things to others, show up more generously, be more “loving.”

But all of that is like trying to share from a glass that’s already empty.

Instead, the answer is found in cleaning out your thoughts about yourself, feeling and processing what you’ve created, and then deciding intentionally what you want to believe and feel about yourself going forward.

This is the work that creates the foundation of a life filled with loving others effortlessly.

You cannot fully love others when you do not love yourself first. It will always come back to that.

Avoiding Feelings – Part 2

How to feel your emotions instead and change your life.

The alternative to resisting and reacting is allowing.

Allowing is about feeling emotions in the moment as they come up.

Like a pipe with water flowing through it, when an emotion comes through, we stay wide open instead of constricting, resisting, and ultimately trapping it inside us.

Most of us have something like fear or sadness come down our pipe and we immediately close off and restrict flow. Then it’s like a blockage, and more and more emotions get stuck behind it as we continue resisting allowing it to process.

That moment when we explode on our kids or spouse, or end up crying it all out in a big overwhelming deluge, is usually the blockage getting pushed through finally.

You know that relief you feel after a good cry? It’s cause you’ve let the emotions finally come through.

But what if you could feel that relief from processing all the time, and in small manageable amounts rather than giant overwhelming floods?

It’s absolutely possible and it’s a skill that you can learn by just using 5 questions.

  1. What are you feeling now? – name one emotion
  2. Where is the feeling in your body? – heavy in your chest, tight in your throat, fluttering in your stomach
  3. What color is this feeling? – dark grey, deep red, bright green
  4. Is this feeling hard or soft?
  5. Is this feeling fast or slow?

As you go through each of these questions, stay in your body rather than your mind.

Try to experience the emotion as a sensation in your body rather than thoughts in your head.

Going forward in your life, whenever you notice yourself resisting or reacting, you can stop and take yourself through the 5 questions.

Allowing your feelings is absolutely possible and a skill that you can learn with practice.

As you learn how to process rather than resist or react, you will show up in your life more centered and empowered because you know you can feel any feeling.

Avoiding Feelings – Part 1

Why we do it and why it’s so bad for us.

Feelings. They are freakin’ everywhere if you’re a living breathing human, but boy do we try to avoid them.

Say for instance, fear. When’s the last time you felt it’s presence and didn’t find yourself reaching for your phone or some ice cream to soften the ugliness of that emotion?

It’s what our society does and it’s what most of us witnessed our parents doing as we grew up.

We saw emotions get processed in one of two ways:

  1. Reacting or
  2. Resisting/Avoiding.

Reacting looks like that 45-minute cry session you had after 3 weeks of keeping it all together.

Or the outbursts of yelling and losing your shit with your kids cause you just can’t seem to keep it inside anymore.

Resisting/Avoiding goes hand in hand with reacting as it’s like the sneaky build up before the storm.

This looks like numbing your brain with Netflix, food, productivity, alcohol, shopping, cleaning, etc. to distract yourself from feeling.

But here’s the thing, humans are not built for emotion storage.

We’re meant to be processors of emotion, letting it come up, be felt, and pass through us.

But somewhere along the way, we got the message that negative emotions are bad and we need to avoid them. That the whole goal of life is to be happy.

“Isn’t it called ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ for goodness sake?! Then why do I keep feeling all this other crap?!”

Well here’s the reality.

Life just isn’t happy all the time.

In fact, if you really get honest with yourself, you’ll see that it’s much closer to 50/50 – 50% positive emotions and 50% negative.

And why that’s so important is because, when we want it to be sunshine and daisies every day and it’s not, we resist and react and make it way worse than it really is.

I like to use the visual of a tea kettle on the stove.

When we are constantly resisting, it’s like the stove is always on, and the pressure inside just keeps building and building until it finally screams out of us through reacting.

But thankfully, you don’t have to feel like a tea kettle fully pressurized and ready to burst all the time…

(Check back next week for part 2 and how to feel your emotion rather than resist/react/and avoid it.)

How will it all work out if I get divorced?

You want to know the how right?

  • “But how am I going to move forward once I decide?”
  • “What will all of that look like?”
  • “How can I avoid mistakes?”

This is a point that all of my clients reach once they’ve coached with me long enough to have identified what they want, figured out their reasons for their choice, and are now ready to move forward.

And I get it, I really do.

I remember when I talked to my lawyer that first time and she told me that it would take 8 months minimum to get divorced and my brain was like “Say what?!”

I could not imagine how on earth I was going to make it through 8 more months. I felt like I was already at the breaking point and needed things to change NOW.

But here’s the reality, I didn’t.

I’m still here, still alive, and I went through each and every day of those eight months that it took to get divorced without knowing ahead of time what it would be like. 

And I was able to do that by trusting in my choice and managing my brain along the way.

The obsession you feel with knowing the “how” is just part of what our human brains are built to do.

You brain wants to analyze all of the risk, try to figure everything out ahead of time, and plan each step.

Some of that is what we do in coaching; we go in and clean out all the closets in your brain and sort and organize everything so that you have a solid foundation, but then there comes a point when it’s time to trust the foundation you’ve laid and just get in there and start going. 

Because here’s the thing, you never know “how” to do something until you actually “do it.”

Like learning how to swim or ride a bike, there’s only so much you can gain from talking and thinking about it before you just have to jump in the pool or get on the bike and start pedaling.  

And with the tools you learn in coaching, that journey of figuring out your “how” becomes less painful because you know how to not make all of the moments when things are tough and you fall down, mean that you’re failing and it’s never going to work. 

You know how to love yourself through all of it and manage your brain so that it’s working with you instead of against you.

Coaching is what helps you find your reasons for your choice and a strong “why” that you can come back to for commitment and resilience as you go through the “how.”

When you have a strong enough why, the how gets naturally figured out each day.

So ask yourself,

  • Do I know my reasons?
  • Do I have a “why” that I love and feel solid about?

If you don’t, invest in coaching to help you create that foundation, and then once you do, trust that the journey will reveal the “how” to you along the way.

“I’m Not Good Enough.”

I’ve been feeling it lately.

The fear of not being good enough.

And I’ve realized it’s a belief that I picked up a long time ago and with good intentions.

Being raised in a pretty strict religion, there was a lot of emphasis on “choosing the right” and being righteous. Making God happy by making good choices and avoiding sin.  The righteous receive blessings and the wicked are punished.

My brain absorbed those thought like a sponge and what I interpreted all of that to mean was that for God to love me, I needed to be my absolute best.  The goal was perfection.  Anything less was failure.

Sure I’d mess up occasionally, but the focus was on the least amount of mistakes possible.  Always striving for better.  More loving, thankful, generous, giving, and patient. Always striving to be more.

But here’s the catch, I’m not perfect. 

I mess up. I lose my shit some days. I believe the worst about others sometimes. I’m not always loving and patient and sweet with my kids. I misjudge situations, take things personally, and miscommunicate.  

And when I’m not perfect, the first thing that comes up for me is shame. And from there, I usually want to blame.  To try and run away from the fact that I’m human and imperfect by blaming others for my feelings and actions.

Where this gets me though is even more disconnection.

The disconnection that started with abandoning myself from the shame that I’m imperfect, then morphs into disconnection from others as I blame them for my actions.

It’s a lose-lose for everyone, but as long as my goal is perfection, the cycle continues.

I use to live perpetually in this cycle, especially when I was married.  My life was a constant struggle and striving to be better and less “me.” 

But you can’t run away from you.

Coaching is what brought me back to myself. 

Learning that FEELING is just part of being a human being, and that I can FEEL anything. 

Jealousy, fear, sadness, and confusion. Nothing has gone wrong when these feelings are present. They are just part of living a human life.

And when I allow myself to be fully human and allow these emotions, I stop resisting and reacting to them. 

Then when I’m “imperfect,” I stay with myself instead of running away into shame and blame.

This practice is what has changed everything for me and makes the biggest difference in my client’s lives.

They learn that you don’t have to be “perfect” to be “good enough.” You are “good enough” just as you are.

Imperfections are built into the very fabric of being a human. And when we embrace the fact that we will fail, and mess up, and fall down, we let go of the shame and blame and can feel more connected to ourselves and all the other imperfect humans around us.

The Duality of Life

Lately I’ve been experiencing the duality of life – Love and loss, full and empty, open and closed, summer and winter, birth and death. 

All around us there are opposites that complete the other half of an experience.

This natural order to things can feel foreign to me at times. 

Part of me wants all love and no loss.  All summer and no winter.  All birth and no death.

Why do we fear these other sides?

We seem to have lost the ability to see the darker colors in life, and still find them beautiful. 

We run from the parts of ourselves that are afraid, and soft, and vulnerable.  We look in those inner rooms of ourselves, pronounce them unattractive, and shut the doors tight.

But these are the places that make us human. 

These are the places asking for witnessing and openness rather than shunning and abhorrence.

Everything dies one day.  Nothing lives forever.

It is in the embracing of your vulnerable parts – the fear of loss, the longing to be seen and loved, the ache of seeking validation that you are enough – that you become whole and stop running from your humanness.

Then you become round and full.  Able to hold the dark with the light, the sunrises and the sunsets, the inhalations and the exhalations, the births and the deaths.

The answer is not to run away and escape, but to stay, open your eyes wide, breathe deep, and allow all of it to be what it is.

Light and dark. Soft and hard. High and low.

Human.

Make the Decision to Stay or Go Intentionally and Then Always Have Your Back Going Forward

Sometimes you can get so caught up in stressing about past decisions and regret that you miss the life and decisions happening right in front of you.

Then life begins to feel like you’re always chasing the tail end of it. Always reacting and recovering rather than intentionally heading where you want to go.

When we make a choice and then don’t have our back on it, we become our own worst enemy.

We put fuel on the fire of those negative inner thoughts and then they go to work tearing us down mentally.

This is why so many of my clients are afraid to decide.  They are afraid of what their mind will do to them afterwards. 

But here’s the thing, every single thing that happens to you after you choose to stay or go is something you get to choose to interpret however you want. 

If you choose to leave you can make going out and getting a job because you’re no longer dependent on your husband’s income mean:

  • an opportunity to try new things or
  • a depressing consequence of previously choosing to be a stay-at-home Mom.

If you choose to stay you can make your husband continuing to forget to take out the trash mean:

  • “He still doesn’t love me and I should have left,” or
  • “It’s just not his thing and it means nothing about how he feels about me.”

The key will always be your mind and what you choose to make everything mean.

When you make the final decision whether to stay in your marriage or go, the greatest predictor of success will be what you choose to make that decision mean and how you have your own back going forward.

This is the foundation that we build together in coaching through examining all of your habits, thoughts, patterns, feelings, beliefs, etc. and making sure that you know yourself and what you want most BEFORE you decide.

Then when you do make that decision, you are set up for success afterwards. 

Instead of floundering and struggling after divorce or spiraling back into depression and contention after choosing to stay, you move forward with purpose and direction into a new future.

It is worth every ounce of time, money, and effort to invest in yourself in this way before making one of the biggest decisions in your life.

This is the work I take my clients through. This is how they decide whether to stay or go, make their decision, and move forward without regret.

You Can Trust Yourself

“I can’t trust myself.”

By the time I was starting to consider divorce, I had already had many years of practicing this belief.

I had developed a pattern of looking to people outside of me for guidance and insight into what I should do in my life.

This looked like taking copious notes at religious meetings and then trying to checklist everything that had been mentioned.

Listening to every comment from my spouse on my appearance – “don’t like bangs, too much jewelry” – and changing it accordingly.

And oversharing with my friends and family in the hopes that someone would tell me the right things to do.

And then, when I would actually decide on my own, when things got tough or didn’t work out like I’d thought, I would beat the crap out of myself mentally. “This was such a stupid idea. What were you thinking? You look like an idiot. Don’t ever do this again.”

It’s like a part of my brain had become this negative animus that was there to constantly shame and judge me whenever I struggled or wasn’t perfect.

It was a seriously sucky way to live. Always worried about what others thought. Always trying to control their thoughts about me by taking actions that I thought they would like.

It was exhausting and felt like a hamster wheel because, newsflash, you never have control over what another human being chooses to think about you.

But coaching changed all of this.

I learned that I could CHOOSE my beliefs about myself.

That the statement “I can’t trust myself” was just a thought. And after seeing what that thought was producing, I could choose to let it go and believe something else about myself.

Slowly, little by little, I started to understand how the negative thoughts I had about myself weren’t helping me at all.

Instead of “motivating” me to change and helping me “get better,” they were creating the very things I was trying to get away from – fear, inadequacy, anxiety, depression, abandonment of self, people pleasing, and hiding.

I slowly started to develop trust in myself by changing my thoughts and my life has steadily improved ever since. I now actively practice thoughts that help me develop trust in and love for myself.

Change is not impossible, and it’s also not as hard as you think. What you believe about yourself is not set in stone, and it absolutely is not a fact.

I work with my clients, step by step, to find these old beliefs about themselves that no longer serve them, and to try on new beliefs that start creating the life they want. Because when they know they can trust themselves, then the choice to stay or go becomes clear and they move forward.

How to Know Your Reasons for Your Choice and Love Them

Growing up there were definitely “right” decisions and “wrong” ones, and whether they were right or wrong was rarely determined by me.

Typically that choice had already been established by my parents, religion, or culture.

But the reality is that there are very few things in the world that everyone would agree on labeling as “right” or “wrong.”  If you try hard enough, you can almost always find one person who believes differently from the group.  Just look at the American political parties. 

This is the beauty of the human brain.

We get to decide what we want to believe is “right” and shape our lives around those beliefs.

In coaching, when we are focusing on deciding whether to stay or go, the focus is not so much on whether you believe it’s “right” or “wrong” (because typically that’s just a judgment given you by other people), but rather:

  1. What are your reasons for your choice? and
  2. Do you like those reasons?

For example, some of my clients notice that one of the reasons for staying in their marriage is that they are afraid of what other people will think if they get divorced, or because they are scared of how they will survive without their spouse’s income.

And other’s notice that one of their reasons for leaving is because they think things will be easier once their spouse is gone, and they want to escape the negative feelings that keep cropping up in their marriage.

We explore how each of these reasons feels and what actions come out of them.

Often my clients identify that they don’t want to stay because of fear and they don’t want to leave from escape.

Together we identify reasons that instead create feelings of strength, self-love, gratitude, peace, openness, and change.

Then, whether they decide to stay or go, they move forward with their decisions and become the very thing that makes their decision “right.” 

Take some time to write down your reasons for both choices in your marriage – stay or go. 

Why do you want to stay?

What are you afraid of if you go?

Look at each of your reasons and ask yourself, “Do I love this reason and the energy that’s behind it?”

You can make this decision and feel good about your choice knowing you love all of your reasons. 

This is what makes it the “right” choice for you.

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash